Intuitive Constraint-Based Robot Programming for Robotic Assembly Tasks

Recent intuitive robot programming approaches operate on task level, enabling programmers to intuitively arrange or compose encapsulating robot capabilities (skills). This paper presents an approach to intuitively create (sub-)skills. General guidelines for assembly process descriptions #2860 provided by the Association of German Engineers VDI are applied to robot programming, in particular addressing assembly applications. The guidelines are exemplarily applied to the constraint-based approach iTaSC (instantaneous Task Specification using Constraints), presenting a procedure to hierarchically combine elementary processes to (sub-)skills. Six elementary processes are identified to be sufficient to implement a wide variety of assembly tasks. An iTaSC implementation was developed and two exemplarily assembly tasks were realized to evaluate the approach.